You don’t feel sorry for somebody who doesn’t eat for a day, gets no sleep or poops their pants while playing? How about the person who totals a new BMW, the guy who loses his wife and kids, or the lady who loses a really nice job? We don’t have enough research to say that it’s JUST a gamer’s fault, or it’s JUST a game’s fault. Even if we did fully understand gaming addiction, and could scientifically blame gamers for being morons, I would still very much feel sorry for them.

This perception is hurting people. Some people can binge, and it’s not a problem for them. These people have balance in their lives, and they’re self-aware. Some people want to play less, but can’t. There are a thousand different reasons for someone to start playing badly, and having this problem is completely legitimate.

Well, i admit im a major WoW addict, I can only play it every other weekend (visitations to my dads) but i play it constantly then. miss movies, miss tv, miss driving paractice time, ext cuz im too busy playing.

However, if i had unlimited access it wouldnt be as big an issue. Sure I would probly play it more then I should, but I have no problem logging out and reading a book/surfing the web/ext. Many of the things people report missing b/c their on the game, i dont want to do weather im on the game mor not, so no biggie.

Can people be truely addicted? Sure, but their morons, and they useually end up getting whats coming to them. If someone can become obsessed enough with the game that the dont eat/sleep, then i can’t say I feel sorry for them when they kick the bucket…..

And a desire to play may be linked to a game’s ability to satisfy a variety of needs, you’re right there. My research showed that most players at the endgame had unique preferences. Even of those fit into the “addict,” category, no two had exactly the same set of preferences. A lot of them displayed a preference for goal-oriented raid guilds (these were predominantly PvP guilds in DAoC, as I understand it). Still, every player seemed to be looking for something tailored to them. We all learn unique play styles.

If the game had a more direct interface, not only a screen and a keyboard and mouse, but also could stimulate our nerve system, the illusion would be perfect and I guess nothing else would be needed. However, as the interface is now, reality is bound to catch up with us. Whereas some could go through life without a human touch, most can’t, and no matter how many emotes, our bodies will after a while realise that the game is as empty as artificial sweetener, and start craving for a real human touch and look in the eye. And in order to get that, as we know, you have to tackle, and learn how to tackle, the real world. Which is why WoW is ultimately an illusion, and an incomplete illusion at that.

My current thought on the WoW problem is this emotional trigger the game pulls. These touch something very basic within us, and those who get hopelessly hooked are probably those who simply cannot trigger this with the real world, thus they start to physically need the only thing that can give them the kick of happiness – World of Warcraft. What I find most interesting now is not so much why WoW managed to trigger these things, but why the real world fails to.

There’s the brain issue. Real addiction. The game might stimulate someone’s brain in just the right way… that they physically do start to need it. Other people can play 2-3 hours, three times per week. They’re great at monitoring themselves, so they’ll never let it get out of hand.

But the brain issue - whether or not someone is really addicted - it connects to areas that we’ve never really seen before. There’s the post that I made yesterday: could we be addicted to sitting? Nutrition and diet are important, often neglected things (especially when we’re raiding).

Could the deep emotional parts of our brains confuse playing a game with real experience? I explore this in a couple articles, linked in my papers section, with an idea called, “media experience.”

But aren’t games like Warcraft, in a new kind of way, real?

These worlds are becoming less and less fake. One researcher found, a few years ago, that Everquest (the WoW equivalent at the time) had a higher GNP than many of the poorer countries in the world. There was more money in EQ’s economy than in a real country, filled with real people. More recently, a cool guy named Thomas Malaby has said that these worlds are ongoing (they’re available to play most of the time), and starting to incorporate more elements of our everyday life. There are real people, fighting us or selling items in unique ways.

In some ways, we really do leave the real world, a “primary world,” and enter one of a few, “secondary worlds,” like WoW, or EQ, or CoH, or Eve, PotBS, and etc. etc.

And these worlds are all kinds of easy. It’s not just easy to select from a short list of professions or classes. It’s easy to mine 5 tonnes of iron ore, then heft it through jungle and desert to a place where you can smelt it down. There are a hundred prohibitively difficult things that just require a click or three.

>>Can people in small village-societies get remotely adicted to WoW, or is it just a huge city phenomenon?

My friend Aaron actually went to Southeast Asia to study kids playing MMO games, like WoW or EQ. He asked them, “If there were a MMO world which perfectly re-created the real world, where would you play?” They said that they’d play right there, at home.

What does WoW trigger in our brains that is so utterly compelling that we forget the world around us? The fake achievements? The “collecting” instinct? The dress-up instinct? The group feeling? How is our brain filling in the gaps so that the guild feels as important, or more important, than our friends? Are there external reasons? Is the world around us so complicated that a WoW server feels more at-home and cosy? Do we feel so anonymous in a world of 5 billion people that we flee to a smaller one? Are we so lost in all the choose-yourselves in the real world that a world of eight selectable professions is preferable? Or is everything aspects inherent of the game itself? Can people in small village-societies get remotely adicted to WoW, or is it just a huge city phenomenon?